The Monster loves cake.
Okay, so most five year olds love cake too. And the Monster has, correctly, correlated “cake” with “birthday” to realize that in general, going to a birthday party means getting cake. So the Monster likes birthdays.
He hasn’t quite… grasped the rest of the birthday concept yet. Continue reading
I think my crowing about the Monster’s being willing and able to share at times has bitten me in the backside.
When the Monster got home from school today, we had about a half hour before he had to dash off to his therapy session. Because he hadn’t finished the snacks in his lunch, the wife gave him the bag of pretzels. Continue reading
Most five year olds have a little trouble sharing things with other children.
The Monster, like most children with Autism, is not particularly good about turn-taking. It was a big struggle, when he was two and three, to teach him to signal (mostly sign-language, but building up to the verbal cue accompanying the sign) “my turn” when it came to things he wanted to play with. Continue reading
My wife tells me sometimes about friends of hers who post to Facebook about how they have “surprised” their children with a trip to Disney World, the morning they are going. Most of this is a lament about how we really can’t do that to to the Monster… both because of how it would backfire in terms of his schedule, and because of his not really being in a place where the surprise would mean anything to him.
No. I’m more fixed on lots of advanced warning, so he knows what’s going on. Continue reading
Now… for those who have paid attention to my avatar (or listened to me mention it before), my escape from the Monster’s Autism is curling. The sport everyone watches during the Olympics every four years, yes, with the brooms on ice. Some folks have music, some folks have other sport endeavors… I go out into a cold room with my broom and throw forty-two pound stones down a sheet of ice.
(I’m used to the quiddich jokes, by the by – they’re getting old.) Continue reading
The Monster plays with a lot of toys. His favorites, though, are the electronic ones – be they his iPad, my Nook, or the computer.
My biggest problem is, despite the huge number of applications out there to encourage children to model social behavior, there’s yet to be invented one that really encourages and rewards proper social behavior. Continue reading
The wife had originally thought of taking the kids to the Zoo today – it seemed to make perfect sense, since (in theory) folks would be in church and we could squeeze in a few hours before it started to rain. Of course, it was cold all day and started to drizzle, and the baby decided he needed a morning nap, so that went right out the window. Instead, I took it on myself to try to get at least some of the Monster’s homework done before the wife’s left with it. Continue reading
We took the Monster to a friend’s birthday party yesterday…
We have a number of friends who have children the same age as the Monster, and make sure to include our child along with their children’s friends, even if the Monster isn’t quite necessarily in a ‘friend’ mode. Continue reading
As I mentioned, I’m attending a bonspiel this week (admittedly, at my own local club – the bonspiel is the 74th Annual Francis Dykes Memorial Bonspiel for men with 5 or fewer years of experience – so I’m coming home at night instead of staying at a hotel closer to the rink), and since we won last night, I don’t have another game until Saturday morning.
Basically, for the uninitiated, a ‘bonspiel’ is a curling tournament, meaning that for this weekend, there are forty teams from fifteen clubs on the East Coast (Carolina to New Hampshire, to be specific) at the club, so it’s very crowded, very warm and very loud in the warm room while games are going on. As you can imagine, that’s probably not a good environment for most children with Autism. While the Monster isn’t sensory adverse, it would almost certainly be too much sensory stimulation even for him, and he’d be inclined to go shrieking and running around between people’s legs.
Curling, itself, is an interesting sport – it’s a five century old Scottish sport that involves two teams of four players on a 160 foot long ice sheet, and somewhat resembles bocce in terms of scoring and chess in terms of strategy. It’s… different than a lot of sports – it’s slower paced most of the time, it’s social, it’s not loud, and it doesn’t require the tremendous amounts of physical coordination that sports like gymnastics, basketball or other activities involve.
The social aspect is important on the ice and afterwards. You have to talk to your teammates to communicate what you’re doing on the ice, what you’re going to be doing, what you want each person doing during a stone’s delivery… and you end up talking to your opponents over beverages and snacks after the match. It’s a very low-barrier-to-entry environment to socialize in a very small group (eight people generally at the end).
I’ve mentioned before (see Have a Ball) that there’s a curling club out in the Midwest that does the occasional program for children and adults with Autism. I’ve since discovered the original message I saw – it’s the Duluth Curling Club, in coordination with the Courage Center – and contacted them to find out how they run their program. Their suggestions were along the lines of what I would have expected – to manage the environment to further decrease the noise, prep the participants for what to expect, go with the adaptations for special needs curling. However, none of their suggestions are anything massive either, and it has a very open path to higher functioning participants to actually transition to ‘normal’ curling when they feel ready.
While the Monster’s not old enough yet to go curling, I’m hoping to get a program started for when he is old enough.
Today is Presidents’ Day, which means that schools and my office are closed.
The wife and the baby have baby-and-me class on Monday mornings, so when we do have a federal holiday on a Monday, I stay home with the Monster, then swing out to the JCC with him to go retrieve the baby, letting my wife have some time for a workout. Continue reading